Guest editors

Call for papers

Social media content (SMC) is changing the way people
interact with each other and share information, personal
messages, and opinions about situations, objects and past
experiences. This content (ranging from blogs, fora,
reviews, and various social networking sites) has specific
characteristics that are often referred as the five V's:
volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value. Most of
them are short online conversational posts or comments
often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual
information, including metadata such as the social network
of each user and their interactions with other users.
Exploiting the context of a word or a sentence increases
the amount of information we can get from it and enables
novel applications. Such rich contextual information,
however, makes natural language processing (NLP) of SMC a
challenging research task. Indeed, simply applying
traditional text mining tools is clearly sub-optimal, as
such methods take into account neither the interactive
dimension nor the particular nature of this data, which
shares properties of both spoken and written language.

We expect that papers in this special issue will
contribute to a deeper understanding of these interactions
from a new perspective of discourse interpretation. We
believe that we are entering a new age of mining social
media data, one that extracts information not just from
individual words, phrases and tags, but also uses
information from discourse and the wider context. Most of
the “big data” revolution in social media analysis has
examined words in isolation, a “bag-of-words” approach. We
believe it is possible to investigate big data, and social
media data in general, by exploiting contextual
information.

We encourage submission of papers that address deep
issues in linguistics, computational linguistics and
social science. In particular, our focus is on the
exploitation of contextual information within the text
(discourse, argumentation chains) and extra-linguistic
information (social network, demographic information,
geo-location) to improve NLP applications and help
building pragmatic-based NLP systems. The special issue
aims also to bring researchers that propose new solutions
for processing SMC in various use-cases including
sentiment analysis, detection of offensive content, and
intention detection. These solutions need to be reliable
enough in order to prove their effectiveness against
shallow bag-of-words approaches or content-based
approaches alone.

Topics of interest

We are particularly interested in submissions that
address the topics below, by leveraging the role of
discourse and/or other contextual information. We believe
there are novel and interesting approaches that can be
developed over the next few years.

Lexical semantic resources, corpora and annotations of
semantic and pragmatic phenomena in social media.

The role of extra-linguistic information in improving
content-based social media applications.

Figurative language detection (metaphor, irony,
sarcasm).

Discourse processing and argumentation mining of
social media texts.

Pragmatic phenomena in computational social
linguistics.

Intention detection (e.g., intention to purchase a
product, or vote for a particular candidate, but also
other behaviours such as suicide).

Detection of offensive and abusive language.

Fake news detection. Tracking rumours.

We also welcome contributions and comparisons on already
studied topics like the following, but submissions need to
highlight the role of discourse and/or other contextual
phenomena:

Social structure and position analysis using microblog
content

Sentiment/opinion retrieval, extraction and
classification

Tracking and summarization of opinion

Emotion detection

Paper format and reviewing policy

Papers should be submitted according to the
Computational Linguistics style:http://cljournal.org/
Send papers using the online submission system: http://cljournal.org/submissions.html.
In Step 1 of the submission process, please select
'Special Issue: Language in Social Media' under the
'Journal Section' heading.
Please note that papers submitted to a special issue
undergo the same reviewing process as regular papers.
Special issues are the same length as regular issues (at
most 5-6 papers) http://cljournal.org/specialissues.html.